Lead, Incidents & Escalations, User Operations

In This Role, You Will

• Participate in an on-call rotation and serve as the active incident lead during live incidents and urgent escalations.
• Own alert intake and triage process across support, safety, customer, and service-impacting issues.
• Assess severity, determine scope and impact, and initiate the appropriate response path.
• Page and coordinate Engineering, Infrastructure, Support Delivery, Product, Legal, Policy, Go-To-Market, and other teams as needed.
• Lead incident response calls, manage timelines, clarify roles, and keep responders focused and unblocked.
• Set internal guidelines for incident communications to all users, including enterprise customers, and own internal updates, executive briefings, customer-facing updates, and external status page updates where required.
• Maintain situational awareness across all customer-facing incidents and parallel workstreams, ensuring the response remains coordinated and customer impact is understood.
• Create and operate the process for monitoring, processing, mitigating, and resolving critical escalations, including formal closure and handoff.
• Identify root causes behind incidents and escalations, lead retrospectives, and coordinate corrective action with accountable teams.
• Track corrective actions to closure and ensure follow-through is focused on the best possible customer outcome.
• Identify recurring operational issues, escalation patterns, and product or process gaps.
• Partner with Engineering, Infrastructure, Product and Support leaders to stay ahead of customer-facing incidents, reduce repeat issues, and improve readiness.
• Improve incident response processes, severity frameworks, playbooks, tooling, reporting, and automation.
• Build a durable operating model for incidents and escalations as OpenAI scales globally.

You Might Thrive In This Role If You

• Have 10+ years of experience in incident management, technical support, escalation management, SRE, technical program management, or production operations.
• Have 5+ years of hands-on experience working in production, on-call, or high-urgency operational environments.
• Have 5+ years of leadership experience, ideally in a Support, Engineering, or similar environment.
• Are comfortable acting as Incident Commander, owning coordination, decision-making, communication, and accountability during live incidents.
• Have direct experience with customer-impacting incidents, executive escalations, safety-sensitive escalations, or high-severity technical issues.
• Can communicate clearly under pressure with engineers, support teams, executives, customer-facing teams, and external stakeholders.
• Have hands-on experience with incident communications, including internal updates, executive briefings, customer updates, and status pages.
• Are experienced with incident management, paging, and alerting tools such as incident.io, PagerDuty, Datadog, Jira, Salesforce, Zendesk, or similar systems.
• Understand monitoring and observability well enough to reason about alerts, system health, customer impact, and incident scope.
• Can lead post-incident retrospectives that produce clear root causes, corrective actions, and durable improvements.
• Drive action items to closure and hold teams accountable without creating unnecessary process drag.
• Are highly organized, calm, and structured in ambiguous or high-pressure situations.
• Can balance hands-on incident execution with longer-term systems building.
• Are excited to use AI and automation to improve triage, routing, summarization, reporting, knowledge management, and incident follow-through.